Professionalism in the Workplace
by Pineapple Pen
Summary: Welcome to Namimori Hospital; where the doctors are foreign and clothes are optional. It's also happens to be the very last place on Earth Hibari would want to be. It's a shame he got shot.
1. Take Off Your Clothes, Don't Fall Over

**Well hello there. It's been a while, yes it has. Mah, I apologise for my inability to upload. Well, not really. I've been busy, and fanfiction hasn't been a priority for me. In any case, to make up for my absence, I'm attempting another multi-chaptered fic for a while. To be honest, I'm not sure where I'm going with this one. All I know is that it's definitely 6918, it an AU, and that, including this one, I only have three chapters planned out.  
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**SO! In the event that I will (likely) run out of ideas, I will now say this: I have pretty much little to no control over my updates, and I make no promises to stick to any sort of schedule. I can only hope that it won't last for eternity like certain _other_ multi-chaptered fics of mine. ¬_¬ **

**Also, it's recently been brought to my attention that people are having difficulty reading the dialogue I write when I use single speech marks rather than double. I've tried to change it so everyone will be satisfied, but since I'm so used to using the apostrophe key to mark speech, I'll have some troubles getting used to actual speech marks, so forgive any inevitable slip ups.**

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**Take Off Your Clothes and Don't Fall Over**

Hibari's dislike of hospitals was most definitely not a fear. That's what he always told himself anyway. It was an aversion. A simple dislike that was certainly much less herbivorous than it sounded. He hated needles, he hated doctors and he absolutely _despised _waiting rooms. _Waiting rooms_, with their out of date magazines and their potted plastic plants and their assortment of pamphlets that only served to scare patients rather than reassure them. And then there was always that one little old lady that would sit right next to him, despite there being plenty of free seats elsewhere, or the annoying small child that would be pressing the tap to the water cooler excitedly, only to accidentally spray the water everywhere.

It wasn't just the waiting rooms that Hibari hated. There was also that pungent medicinal smell that assaulted his senses, reminding over and over him that yes, he was reluctantly in need of medical attention. Every time he breathed in through his nose, that smell would be there, making his eye twitch in annoyance and his stomach churn unpleasantly. Not that he would ever admit that though.

And then there were the doctors. In their white coats and ties, their shoes polished to a high mirror shine that blatantly yelled out 'I'm making so much more money than you!' Stethoscopes draped around their necks and glasses perched on their noses, pens poking out of breast pockets and medical charts in their hands. They always had bright friendly grins on their faces, but their eyes would be wishing for the day to be over. Hibari hated them. Hated how they crowded together, or how they patronized him as if he were nothing but a child.

Self-righteous, stuck up bastards. The lot of them.

Hibari made a point to avoid visiting hospitals whenever possible, though that was difficult in his line of work. Being a police officer, he was bound to invite a few unwanted injuries that really couldn't be taken care of with just a splash of disinfectant, a bandage and a safety pin. Then again, Hibari wasn't usually one to actually let himself get injured so easily, not like his herbivorous coworkers. Nobody in Namimori was as strong as he was, so nobody in Namimori was able to land so much as a hit on him.

Unless guns were brought into the equation.

It was a peculiar feeling, being shot, but he didn't even really notice until he had chased down the criminal and turned him into a bloodied smear of an afterthought on the ground. Yes, he acknowledged that there was a light pain in his arm, but had quickly ignored it. After all, it was just a little shock, like someone had shuffled together a defibrillator and pressed it to his shoulder to awaken his pain receptors. But, like the dutiful police officer he was, he completely blanked out the light pain and continued with his job.

It was only when his adrenaline levels had dropped and when the bloodied pleb of a criminal was being carted away on an old rickety gurney that he realized that his shoulder was actually in quite a lot of pain. A decidedly odd sensation, a sharp stinging feeling, like someone had jammed their fingers into his skin and twisted.

He had looked down at himself with a deep set frown, blinking at the frayed material of his blue uniform, watching as the crimson blood oozed out and stained the fabric an unattractive brown. Curiously, he had cocked his head, finally acknowledging that he had been shot. And that was when the pain really started to kick in. It had been noticed now and had clearly decided that it would promote itself from a sharp stinging sensation, to a pain so vivid and biting that it made Hibari briefly question his mortality.

Quite frankly, Hibari was more annoyed that his uniform had been ruined.

As the pain grew, Hibari began to realize that he may actually need medical attention. Losing too much blood could potentially get problematic for him in the long run, and he didn't really feel like passing out in the middle of the street. It was an inconvenience born of his own carelessness, and he supposed that he needed to get it fixed, especially since the world seem to be turning maybe just a little bit faster than what he was used to. And was there always two of everything?

Fifteen minutes later, after outright refusing a wheelchair, he found himself sitting in a damned waiting room, a graying old lady chatting animatedly to one side of him, a seven year old sneezing boy on the other. The chair was uncomfortable, the air smelt like antiseptic, his arm was throbbing and there was a worryingly large vein in his forehead that was pulsing harder with every time the old lady on his left patted his hand with some sort of cooing proverb that quite frankly made no sense to him.

He breathed hard through his nose to stop himself from making a decidedly herbivorous noise as he clamped a hand around his hastily bandaged wound in attempt to stop it from bleeding too much. It had been a while since he had visited a hospital – the last time being because he broke his hand from punching someone just a little too hard in the face – so he was suddenly very aware of how uncomfortable he was. His leg was jumping, his stomach twisting and every so often his brow would twitch in a manner that only served to annoy him more.

Nurses in their white dresses and sensible shoes would scuttle in and out of the room, sometimes carrying a clipboard, sometimes calling out a name. Hibari often wondered why the hell the sniffles of a small child took precedent over a potentially dangerous gunshot wound to the upper arm, or why the chatty old lady was shuffling off with her hunched back and her chirpy pleasantries to see the doctor before him.

His name was called out after two almost unbearably long hours of sitting in that hellish waiting room, eyes flicking from a poster on the wall asking him if he had checked his urine for blood lately to a pamphlet on the table before him with a cartoon uterus giving him information on the stages of pregnancy. Not something he would usually choose to concentrate on, but it took his mind off being in a waiting room – especially when a tired young mother with a set of obnoxiously loud twins strode in.

The walk through the hospital only served to remind him why he hated such places. Old gray men in slippers and white gowns trudged down the hallways, using their drip stands as crutches, teenage boys were being carted about on wheelchairs with broken limbs – a leg, an arm, one even had a his foot twisted at a decidedly odd angle.

It wasn't just crowding. It was _contagious_ crowding. A woman coughing weakly into her hand could easily have influenza, the young boy with red bumps all over his face could be a potential victim of smallpox, the middle-aged man with the rounded purple swelling above his eye could have the bubonic plague for all he knew. There were all sorts of germs and viruses floating about hospitals, and Hibari didn't want to be on the receiving end of one, thank you very much.

He followed the nurse silently, noticing with a spark of irritation that her feet were making soft slapping noises on the much too clean floor. Each and every step she took reminded him what had happened, what he had _let_ happen. _You got shot, you got shot, you got shot_. Mocking him, laughing at him. He found himself glaring at the rubber shoes the petite nurse wore, half growling at them bitterly. He could feel his shoulder start to bleed again, and it seemed like the world around him was spinning, though he refused to acknowledged that this was a case of dizziness. There was no way _he_ of all people could possibly have such a herbivorous symptom of being shot in the goddamn arm.

How did it happen again? One moment he was chasing after some criminal scumbag that needed putting down, and the next he was _still_ chasing him, only now with a bullet lodged into his arm, and blood dribbling out and staining his beloved uniform. It was _impossible_ for the bastard to have shot him, since Hibari had him in his sights at all time.

Unless, of course, he had an accomplice.

Almost groaning at the realization, Hibari slumped his shoulders, only to immediately return to his original position when he felt just how much it _fucking_ hurt to convey his exasperation. His jaw set and his hand shot to his arm, trying to hold in the pain that he refused to acknowledge.

Upon arriving to the hospital not two hours and fifteen minutes earlier, he had been given basic first aid since he had outright refused to be treated like some herbivorous patient (_you got shot, you got shot, you got shot.)_ A bandage here, a pain pill there and he was deemed by the power invested in the nurse at the front desk by the Namimori hospital ready to wait for some big shot, stuck-up-his-own-ass doctor. Now, however, the pain pill was wearing off, and Hibari was _seriously_ considering overly harassing the unusually tiny nurse for a shot of morphine or some equally opiate drug that would send him into blissful semi-unconsciousness.

Fortunately, his carnivorous nature overthrew his desire to accidentally land himself on the sex offenders list, and his shook his thoughts from his head.

After what seemed like a lifetime of thinking through his steps so he wouldn't stumble (_left foot, right foot, left foot right foot)_ the nurse finally arrived at a room. She bowed politely to Hibari, clipboard held against her chest, and mumbled something about the doctor arriving shortly before she scuttled off with those horribly noisy rubber shoes.

(_You got shot, you got shot, you got shot.)_

Frowning, he pushed his way into the room and looked around, hand still pressed against his wound. This...this he was not expecting. It could have been his semi-delirious state because of the blood, but Hibari was certain that a physician's office should _not _be that messy.

The desk was strewn with papers and unfilled prescriptions, along with a tipped over pencil pot with one, two, three pens lying by it. Nearby the pot was an opened bar of chocolate, half-eaten, and a mug with the words 'world's prettiest princess' written across it in swirly pink English writing, topped off with a cute little glittery crown that had Hibari raising his brows in unsurity.

Some of the documents had been swept from the desk by the wind coming from an open window, and at least three papers had landed on a blue swivel chair that look like it had seen one too many twirls. Unprofessional? Hell yes. Hibari was suddenly very skeptical of who was going to walk through that door to see to his bloody arm that just so happened to have a bullet very rudely intruding.

He didn't hear the door open behind him – maybe that was because his ears were ringing obnoxiously loudly – so he almost jumped when a smooth and very male voice spoke behind him. "Take off your shirt and pants and sit down on the bed."

Instead of jumping in surprise, Hibari instead turned around a little too sharply to face the speaker. Under normal circumstances, Hibari would have pulled off a smooth move like that with an air of finesse that demonstrated his skilled performance when he fought (or, in layman's terms, made him look really cool.) However, due to his light head, the blood that never seemed to stop pouring from his arm, and the pain pills that had worn off enough to let him feel pain, but not enough to keep his head clear, he found himself victim to a rather disorienting wave of vertigo.

And so he stumbled.

The doctor didn't bother making a move to help him as the sudden turn sent him to the floor. Though Hibari _did_ try to retain his dignity by grabbing something to stop his likely-to-be humiliating descent to the ground, his inhibited senses made hand-eye coordination just about impossible. His hand swiped at thin air and his leg gave out under him and he fell quite pathetically right on his arm.

Now, there were a few ways Hibari could have reacted to this situation, and he mused about these as he fell and as he lay there in half shock. Firstly, he could stand up, punch the doctor in the head and make a herbivorous escape that would taint his record as the invincible, stoic carnivore of Namimori. Secondly, he could blush like a girl, stand up and not meet the doctor's eyes. This too would ruin his reputation, and was an option that Hibari was ashamed of coming up with. (He blamed it on the blood loss.)

Instead, he decided to pretend that it hadn't happened.

Licking his lips, he sat up and blinked, immediately taking note that the doctor wore leather boots rather than the rubber shoes most other staff in the hospital wore. Languidly, slowly, making sure he wouldn't humiliate himself more, Hibari pulled himself up and ignored the searing pain shooting through his arm and now his leg from where he had twisted it at a peculiar angle. He nonchalantly brushed himself off.

"My shirt and pants?" he repeated, absently wondering if his face was flushed in the humiliation he was trying to ignore.

The doctor smirked. Cocked his head. "Well, the pants are optional," he said airily, moving to approach his chair, "but I think we'd both prefer it if they were off."

And that was when Hibari, even in his disoriented state, decided that he absolutely loathed this man.

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**First chapter up! That wasn't so painful. Maybe when I get a few more chapters written, I'll find a direction which I want to explore.** **For now, it's just a plotless AU that may somehow blossom into something worth the time I'm planning to spend on it. Hopefully, I'll manage to stick with this one. I must admit, I have missed writing 6918. Let's try and keep this fandom alive people! :D**


	2. The Pros and Cons of Drugging Up

**So far so good, yes? This chapter came out easier than I thought it would, considering I don't really have a set plot for this fic yet. We meet Mukuro-sensei properly in this chapter, and I must say, I _love_ writing him as the playful doctor. I can just imagine him sat there, giving bogus medical advice for shits and giggles. **

**Now, I don't claim to know anything about hospitals, and I'm much too lazy to do any proper research. That being the case, the processes used in the fic are probably not very accurate. Shall we just say that Mukuro has his own way of treating patients? It certainly would make for a better excuse than 'the author is just too lazy.'**

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**The Pros and Cons of Drugging Up**

When Hibari thought of doctors, he thought of their pretentious white coats. He thought of shiny metal stethoscopes and he thought of thin framed glasses covering bored eyes. They were the type of people who grouped together like sheep, donning expensive clothes and going to the 'club' to pay golf together, pretending to be friends but actually hating each other and everyone else. They would look after their patients well enough, but as soon as the day was over, they would hop in their expensive cars, drive on home and go to sleep in their big comfy beds, in their big fancy houses.

When Hibari thought of doctors, he didn't think of tall foreigners with their top buttons undone or their ties tied loosely around their neck. He didn't think of long blue hair, tied into a low ponytail, topped with spikes that strangely resembled a pineapple. This particular doctor wore the thin framed glasses, he wore the stethoscope religiously around his neck, but there was something about him that was different to all of the other doctors Hibari had the displeasure to meet.

Maybe it was the eyes.

One blue, fairly normal (not so much in Japan, but this guy was _foreign_) and the other crimson red, the pupil inside deformed to look like the number six. Hibari, in his disoriented state, found himself momentarily transfixed by this peculiar, rather demonic eye, before he realized that yes, this doctor _had_ just made a suggestive comment to him, and _no_, he was _not_ happy about that.

Putting aside the peculiar and decidedly unprofessional appearance, Hibari growled, "What did you just say?"

The doctor examined him. "Hm, you want to keep your pants on then?" he guessed. "Alright then. Each to his own, I suppose. Take off your shirt and sit on the bed anyway so I can see to that wound of yours. Unless, of course, you would rather let it get infected. If that happens, I may have to amputate. Then again, let's be optimistic – maybe it will drop off on its own." He grinned playfully and swept the papers from his chair to the floor, sitting down and swirling a little so he was facing the desk.

Hibari frowned and approached the bed, sending a wary glare to the strange doctor. Quite frankly, he was quite relieved to sit down. He was seeing double, and he still wasn't entirely sure whether the pineapple on the top of the doctor's head was real or not. For all he knew, the strange spikes could be just be there through the fault of his distorted vision, because _surely_ nobody would be stupid enough to go around with a fruit on their head, right?

He sat himself on the bed slowly so he wouldn't slip and fall again, and reached up to unbutton his shirt. When he had arrived at the hospital, his sleeve had been cut away so that the nurse could temporarily bandage the wound for him, so he didn't really see a reason to strip down. He knew better to question a physician though, even _if_ said physician looked like he got his medical license from the back alley of a strip club for 10,000 Yen and a sexual favor.

The doctor swirled on his chair to face Hibari, a medical chart in his hand. "My name is Rokudo Mukuro," he introduced. "You can call me Rokudo-sensei or Mukuro-sama, it's up to you. And unless that nurse is entirely incompetent, you are Hibari Kyoya, correct?"

Hibari eyed Mukuro with a frown and a glare, but he managed a slow nod, absently recognizing that his eyes were blinking overtime. His vision was wavering, like he was looking through a pair of thick glasses that were not prescribed to him, or watching someone through wavy water. Even so, he tried his best to keep his composure, absolutely refusing to let himself fall down to rest on the checkup bed that looked oh so tempting. The doctor wasn't talking, but he was smirking as he read through Hibari's chart as a teenage girl would read through a gossip magazine.

"A colorful record, I see," he hummed with hint of playfulness that Hibari was sure didn't belong in the voice of a physician. He flicked his annoyingly mismatched eyes up, gaze laced with amusement, as if he thought that Hibari's childhood encounters with pneumonia and other similar herbivorous ailments were somehow funny. "Now, how can I help you?"

A part of Hibari wanted to let out an incredulous laugh, but that was the part of him doped up on pain meds that didn't quite work as they were supposed to. The more rational part of him glared. Mukuro knew exactly what was wrong, it was pretty damn obvious, but evidently he was going to make Hibari say it.

He sucked in a breath (immediately regretting it because of the dizzy spell it brought on) and narrowed his eyes until they were nothing but slits. "I got shot," he ground out, punctuating each word with sharp venom and half a growl. He had to remind himself to relax, to calm last time he punched a doctor, along with the satisfaction of bloodying his fists on the man's nose, he also got a two months suspension from work and a black mark on his record. (_Not worth it, not worth it, not worth it.)_

"Oh dear. A little careless, are we?"

(_Not worth it._)

Hibari knew that if he held in his annoyance anymore, his face would flush the same unattractive vermillion as a strawberry he had once found on the floor of his kitchen, and while he was not particularly a man to care much about his appearance, he definitely did not want to burst a blood vessel over something so ridiculous. It would mean more time in the hospital.

Pressing his feet to the floor, Mukuro gave himself a push, shimmying his swivel chair towards the examination bed, coming to a halt at Hibari's side. At one point he had tugged on a pair of white latex glove, allowing him to touch Hibari's arm. The officer immediately stiffened at the unwanted touch, and a low warning growl broke from the back of his throat automatically, the words 'stranger danger' dancing around in his cloudy head in the voice of some bratty child he had to reprimand one day.

It was over oddly quickly. Mukuro fumbled around with surprising professionalism, re-cleaning the wounded area and injecting him with something that had Hibari's whole arm feeling like it had just painlessly dropped off. The bullet was dug out, the area cleaned (for the third time, Hibari remembered) and the gaping (tiny, really) hole in his bicep was stitched up quickly with a sadistic smirk and a cheery hum. Hibari had insisted on not turning away throughout the whole procedure, even when the needles pierced his skin – a sight alone to make him pale. But he soldiered through it like the carnivore he was, not quite admitting to himself that he _so_ didn't trust the eccentric looking doctor.

When he was done, Mukuro leaned forward, one hand on Hibari's arm and the other pushing up his glasses and, for one utterly horrific moment, Hibari was certain that he was going to kiss the stitched up circle of skin. He didn't, naturally; he had only been checking his work, but that didn't stop Hibari from curling his upper lip over his teeth in half-shock and disgust. Maybe it was the anesthetic or the fresh batch of pain pills that Mukuro had given him, but Hibari's head was swimming in clouded waters, wanting to dunk and hold its breath until it fell asleep.

"You're going to have to stay the night," Mukuro hummed offhandedly, using the bed to push his chair back to his desk, "so the nurses can check up on you."

Hibari sneered and, in a moment of idiocy, slipped off the bed. He was fortunate enough not to fall this time, but he stumbled a little until he settled himself into somewhat of a steady position. "I'm not staying here," he growled, squinting his eyes in order to look for his shirt. He felt drunk.

"You are high on morphine," chuckled the doctor, leaning back in his chair and grinning at him knowingly. "You're in no fit state to go anywhere."

Morphine? That was nothing.

"I don't answer to you," Hibari muttered, finally locating his elusive shirt. He grimaced a little at blood marring the white, but he shrugged it on anyway and blinked himself in sobriety (or the closest to sobriety as he could possibly muster.) "I'm leaving."

"Of course you are," smirked Mukuro, spinning his chair and waving his hand absently. "You can discharge yourself at anytime – just talk to the nurse at the desk. Don't break your stitches, don't operate heavy machinery until the morphine wears off, etcetera, etcetera."

He waved Hibari away uncaringly, turning to his desk to check his likely stolen princess cup for traces of coffee, sighing when he found it empty. Hibari regarded him suspiciously, lips turned down at the corners, eyes unfocused and his arm feeling oddly tingly, like he had sat on it for hours on end. Was he swaying on the spot too? He couldn't tell, since his vision had been doubled, though it _was_ an admittedly significant improvement on the triple, almost quadrupedal vision he had before, he supposed.

Satisfied that the doctor wasn't going to call him back for some surprise flu shot or something equally unnecessary, Hibari turned and blinked at the door, physically stopping himself from stumbling and probably falling over again, and...and, was the floor nearer to his head than it used to be?'

"Oh, you're fine, yes, of course," the doctor hummed behind him. Hibari growled when he heard the swirl of his chair. "Something tells me that you are not used to being so weak."

(_Not worth it.)_

Hibari lifted his head from the floor and glared at Mukuro. "I am _not_ weak," he growled, having enough of his sense left to know that the comment was intended as a playful insult. His left, injured arm wouldn't move – or at least he couldn't feel it move – so he relied on his right arm to push himself up. It shook at the pressure but he managed to tug himself up into a seated position, where he decided to stay.

The doctor was watching him with a grin curled on his features, evidently enjoying every moment and making not a single move to help him stand. There was a sadistic pleasure in his eyes that just made Hibari want to punch him in the mouth, hopefully knock out a few teeth, hopefully smashing his glasses into those peculiar mismatching eyes, maybe even blinding him a little.

"Can you get up yourself," he hummed condescendingly, "or would you like me to get a nurse?"

In all of his twenty-six years of life, Hibari had the ultimate death glare down to a tee. No matter the situation, no matter how tired, inebriated or just plain out of it he was, he would always be able to look at that one idiot with a glare so perfect, that they always understood how much he wanted them to die. Narrowed eyes, furrowed brows and lips pressed into a thin line. In a perfect world, said ultimate death glare would have been able to shoot out laser beams, but alas, all he was able to do was glare really hard and hope that out of some miracle, the receiver of the glare would just blow up at the sheer intensity of it.

With twenty-six years of experience under his belt, Hibari was able to quite adequately glare at Mukuro as if he was a piece of chewed up strawberry bubblegum beneath his shoe, even under whatever drug he had been given to relieve the pain. Unfortunately for Hibari and his super ultimate death glare, in the whole short time he had known the doctor, he seemed to have developed an immunity. That annoyed Hibari much more than it should have.

Mukuro stood, looking much taller now that Hibari was sat on the floor, and consulted the chart he had cast aside earlier.

To be honest, Hibari wanted nothing more than to go to sleep right where he was sat, lean his head back, close his eyes and sprawl himself windmill style on the floor like the discarded papers that had been swept from the desk. His vision was spiraling, his head was throbbing and his shoulder was so numb that he wasn't actually sure if it was even there anymore. What if that crazy looking doctor hadn't actually fixed the bullet wound after all? What if he had actually sawed off the injured area and then kept the appendage in some sort of Hannibal Lecter esque manner?

"He's really out of it," a small voice said, half breaking him from his grotesque thoughts. It sounded like someone was speaking to him through a thick pair of headphones, or like he was sitting underwater and someone was shouting down at him.

"Just put him in a bed and wait it out." That was the voice of Rokudo Mukuro, the doctor. Hibari glared at the sound and forced his eyes open, not entirely sure when he actually closed them.

There was a nurse squatting down next to him, checking his pulse with nimble fingers before examining his pupils concernedly. Though his eyes were blurred, so much so that he was absently questioning on whether he needed glasses, he could tell that she was a different nurse from the one before.

He slipped his eyes closed again and frowned, making himself more comfortable on the floor, because all he wanted now was sleep.

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**I tried to keep Hibari as IC as I could, but let's keep in mind that everyone keeps shooting him up with pain pills and morphine. Got to admit, Hibari was just as fun to write as Mukuro. I like getting into his head and bullying him. If he was real (which I will always maintain as a possibility, you never know) I'd be the type of person to poke him with a stick. The violent anime characters are always more fun to bully in fics.**

**As for Mukuro, I wasn't able to explore his playful side as much as I would have liked to in this chapter, but I have an idea of what I'm going to make happen in the next one. I've already started the first few paragraphs, so let's hope I can keep updating at reasonably regular times.**


	3. Clutter in a Dress

**What we see here is an exampe of an author's attempt to gain some sort of story line, only to fail and just make story (and BL) progression harder. I fear that I'm making Hibari dislike Mukuro so much, that it will be much harder to make them gay it up in the future. Whatever the case, I'm just glad I updated.**

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**Clutter in a Dress**

The first time Hibari woke up in a hospital, he was six years old. It had been a harsh winter that year, and he had spent maybe a little too much time in the snow, harassing the other kids on his street with snow-boulders, threatening to drown anyone who stepped into his territory. Naturally, his territory included a whole five meter circle around his home, including (but not limited to) the garden wall of the nice old lady who gave him lemonade in the summer. Pneumonia had plagued him for the rest of the winter and the start of spring and, quite frankly, he had not been happy. He had woken up with a start, unsure what to make of waking up in a strange place, before proceeding to take over the whole children's ward.

It felt something of an anniversary when he woke up, twenty whole years after his first attack of pneumonia, only this time he wasn't greeted by the overly smiling face of the pediatrician and a severe case of the sniffles. The officer woke up to a throbbing shoulder, a headache that felt like wildfire in his mind and a drowsy feeling that made him just want to stay lying there with his eyes shut.

He could hear the buzz of hospital equipment, a heart monitor here and the beep of a pager there. Nurses were darting about in their oh so sensible rubber shoes, and doctors were strutting with their charts and their stethoscopes, talking in their deep voices as they conversed with their patients. The sterile stench of the environment and the bright white of the lights made Hibari scrunch up his nose bitterly and throw an arm over his heavy eyes with a bitter seethe.

"Damned herbivores," he muttered to himself. Memories of the day before flooded back to him in a wave of humiliation and annoyance, like they were poking him in the brain with a sharp stick, shouting in a thousand voices, _Remember yesterday? Remember how herbivorous you were? Remember that bastard doctor that drugged you?_ If Hibari were the type, he would have cringed and hung his head, hands clasped tightly in his lap and his shoulders hunched with his cheeks burning to dangerous levels.

Instead, Hibari peeled his eyes open, sat up heavily and glared ahead of him. Fortunately, the curtains around his bed had been drawn, leaving him boxed in his area of the room with not a single herbivore in sight. Suspiciously (he never did trust hospitals) he peered around. The curtain was patterned with square shades of blue, and it was so thick that Hibari couldn't see any silhouettes through it. The fact remained, however, that he was not in a private or even semi-private room like he usually was whenever he was admitted into hospital. He was in a ward.

It went without saying that Hibari was certainly not a people person, and the hospital staff were usually quite good at keeping other individuals away from him. Placing him in a ward was asking for trouble, so Hibari automatically (and likely correctly) assumed that it was the doing of the damned pineapple-headed doctor that had seen to his injury the day before.

He shot his head up when the curtain opened and a nurse stepped in with a clipboard hugged against her chest and a vacant look in her eye. Evidently, she didn't expect Hibari to be awake so soon after passing out (though he maintained that he simply fell asleep) since she let out a short gasp and dropped her clipboard. The papers flung from their clip and scattered to the floor, some slipping under Hibari's bed, some obnoxiously gliding under the thin gap of the curtain.

"I'm sorry," she said in a somewhat familiar small voice, scrambling to pick up the documents with a flush on her pale cheeks. She was pretty, but had a certain crippling shyness about her that most men would overlook as being antisocial if the way she avoided eye contact like the plague said anything. Her purple hair was tied back in a tight bun, some strands escaping from the captives of the silver clip and she wore a white medical patch over her right eye. Awkwardly, she reached under Hibari's bed and pulled the sheet that had fled the board before getting back to her feet, forgetting about the one that had flown outside of the boxed area the curtain made.

Finally, she got back to her feet, pressing the board back to her chest but unable to wipe the blush from her face. She cleared he throat and introduced herself, "My name is Dokuro," she said softly. "You passed out yesterday and we brought you to the ward."

Hibari's brow twitched. "I didn't pass out," he claimed blankly, fixing her with a blunt stare. He would complain about the ward situation later.

To her credit, and against what Hibari assumed her character to be, the Dokuro girl didn't even flinch. "You were administered with high levels of morphine," she continued, still avoiding his gaze, "but since you...fell asleep, we haven't given you anything else. I could get some painkillers if you'd like. I'm sure you have a horrible headache."

"I don't need painkillers." He definitely needed painkillers, but his pride would never allow him to stoop so low as to ask for the help of some drug.

"Alright then," she nodded, though Hibari had a strange inkling that she may have been unconvinced. She looked down at the sheets she had dropped just moments ago before glancing back up. Hibari noticed that she focused more on his lips, his nose or his cheeks rather than his eyes. A polite way of avoiding eye contact. "Mukuro-sama...Ah, Rokudo-sensei, I mean, said that he wants to see you, but after that you are free to discharge yourself."

Hibari frowned at the mention of the deranged doctor and he sneered automatically. He had to admit, however, though he wanted nothing more than to discharge himself, go back to work and find the bastard who shot him, he also wanted to see Rokudo Mukuro again. The doctor had seen him at a weakened state, which allowed him to tease and make fun of Hibari without any consequences. Hibari had his senses back now, he had his wits and his mind about him, and quite frankly he just wanted to bite the dubious physician to death.

At the thought of the pineapple doctor, his expression twisted into a grimace and he curled his fingers into the folds of his hospital gown. He blinked. Looked down at himself in unsurity.

"Who undressed me?" he demanded slowly, like a ticking time-bomb two seconds away from exploding.

Finally, Dokuro made eye contact. The blush on her face intensified tenfold, as if she had been left out to cook in the sun too long, and her one visible eye widened. "Um, well, usually a nurse would have done it, but in your case..." She drifted off unsurely, breaking the eye contact to stare at the curtain.

Hibari's eyes narrowed dangerously. "In my case, what?" he growled.

"Well, Mukuro-sama insisted..."

There was a moment of not quite silence where Hibari was absolutely sure that he felt some important in his brain snap like a rubber band. Some nerve that ran the speech center of his brain, or the aspect that controlled all kinds of capable thought and reasoning. Whatever it was, it sent his eyebrow twitching into overtime and wiped his mind of everything other than 'kill the pineapple' and similar variations of the phrase. The thing that had broken inside of his head was evidently a strong point in his own personality, since he felt his face heat up from his neck to the top of his forehead, flushing his cheeks the same shade as Dokuro's.

Then, the rubber band snapped back into place and he shot his head up to stare at Dokuro incredulously. The time bomb exploded, and that same something that had broken inside him erupted like Vesuvius, bubbling over all rational thoughts and feelings, replacing everything with just the color red. Hibari was not known to be friendly, was not known to let people touch him, _especially _without his permission, and was certainly not known to let strange men take off his clothes while he was unconscious.

Seeing that Hibari was steps away from throwing himself up and going on a rampage that would likely rival that of Godzilla, Dokuro sheepishly bowed. "I'll tell Muku...Rokudo-sensei that you've woken up," she said politely. On a second thought, she added, "Please don't break anything."

Her exit gave Hibari the opportunity to stew silently in his rage, letting it boil up inside him while at the same time trying to work out if he still had underwear on without all of the awkward fumbling of checking with his hands. Rationality was something that eluded Hibari whenever his mind saw fit to send him into a bubbling fit of anger, but he always managed to keep himself cool and collected until he had the opportunity to release. In this case, however, the barrier keeping his outbursts of needless violence was slowly ebbing away, as if Rokudo Mukuro himself had personally took a trip inside his mind and was chiseling at the wall like some archeologist chasing after some great big discovery.

Steeling his sudden urge to bite everyone and everything in a fifty meter radius to death, Hibari took another glance around the curtained box he was in. The last thing he wanted to do was face the deranged doctor in a backless hospital gown and the unsurity of whether or not he was wearing underwear. It would lower whatever advantage he had over him, and would just all around make him look weak. With that in mind, he searched for his clothes, not at all caring that his shirt would have been completely ruined, what with the blood stains, the bullet hole, and the area where the nurses had lobbed off his sleeve.

He had no luck, and ended up still dressed in the ridiculous, almost green, almost blue gown that made his underarms itch when Rokudo Mukuro pulled back the curtain and strode towards him with a dubious grin and a playful expression crossing his features.

"My, my," he mock cooed. "Don't you look frightening."

Hibari physically held himself back from leaping from the bed and tackling the herbivore to the floor. "Where are my clothes?" he demanded immediately, curling his fingers into the sheets of the bed and ignoring the shooting pain up his left arm.

Mukuro waved his hand dismissively. "Around, I assume," he said. He pushed his glasses up his nose and cocked his head as he regarded Hibari. The empathetic look that so many doctors had perfected showed no signs of making up home on Mukuro's face, leaving only a dark grin and please expression in its place – as if the doctor was enjoying Hibari's humiliation. While Hibari hated the false empathy other doctors would throw his way, he found that he hated Mukuro's amusement so much more.

"I want my clothes," he ordered darkly, feeling very much like a child that had been refused seconds on desert.

"Patience, Hibari Kyoya," Mukuro said, stepping closer. Hibari noticed earrings glinting in his ears – against the health code, he was _sure_. Perhaps he could arrest the herbivore for that. "Standard procedure dictates that I should ask you some follow up questions, but I'm afraid that I've never been very good at following the rules." Mukuro briefly consulted Hibari's chart before lolling his gaze towards the officer himself. "Perhaps I should recommend you stay here. After all, yesterday you passed out right on my floor. I had to carry you all the way to this ward, you know."

Hibari growled, "I'll bite you to death."

"I was going to leave you there, but then dear Nagi convinced me otherwise," continued the doctor airily, waving his hand as if it was such an inconvenience to him. "I had been meaning to clean up the clutter in that room anyway."

It was an exaggeration, Hibari knew, but it didn't stop him from almost shaking with rage. The thought of being touched unnecessarily by that man made his blood boil and his teeth grind, though there was no way hospital regulation would have allowed Mukuro to physically carry him all the way to the ward. There were stretchers for that sort of thing, or even wheeled hospital beds.

"Oya, you look mad," Mukuro grinned, enjoying the situation way too much for a doctor. "Is that glare of yours supposed to scare me? Forgive the lack of reaction. I have seen plenty of people similar to yourself, and I'm afraid you don't quite make the grade. Come back when you are four foot taller and ten times less aesthetically pleasing. Perhaps then I will cower at your presence."

Attire be damned, Hibari was not going to take this man's bullshit lying down. He gritted his teeth together and threw himself out of the bed in attempts to punch the doctor at least once before hospital security tackled him to the ground. Suspension would definitely be on the cards, but Hibari decided that it would be perfectly worth it just to see Mukuro's blood go splattering against the blue squares on the curtains. Besides, he would be forced to take time off anyway with his injury, so really he had nothing to lose.

He was only slightly aware of how ridiculously weak he must have seemed as he stood barefooted on the hospital linoleum. His backless hospital gown (which was, let's face it, basically a dress) had crumpled up to reveal the hem of his underwear – and, despite the situation, he was internally relieved to find out that he was still wearing them – and his hair was ridiculously tousled from unconsciousness. He had pressed his arm automatically against his chest, as if he wore a sling, as it was the least painful position for him, while he readied the other arm for some serious biting to death.

When the doctor parried the punch Hibari sent his way, he chuckled – a low, decidedly odd 'kufufu' sound that seemed more fitting on an evil antagonist in some action packed manga than a simple doctor, whose sole purpose was to help the injured and the weak. Hibari found himself momentarily stunned that his attack had been countered, and he looked up at the taller man.

"Oya, oya," Mukuro grinned, his eyes glinting, "that's no way to treat your doctor."

* * *

**Finally, a conversation that doesn't involve medication. Well, I say 'conversation', but what I really mean is teasing, torment and the occasional death threat thrown in with a light bout of pervertedness. Shall we all take a moment to question the morals of our favourite illusionist? Then again, if you were faced with an unconscious Hibari Kyoya, wouldn't _you_ insist on undressing him? I know I certainly would.**

**Chrome was thrown in there as a last minute decision. Originally, it was some nameless character, but then I decided that I didn't want any annoying OC's messing up what little plot I have and confusing both myself and likely you readers. Chrome seemed like the perfect replacement because A, I thought she would suit a similar AU career as Mukuro; B, it seemed rather fitting to turn her into a nuse, and C, she's one of the few anime female characters in KHR that doesn't seriously annoy me - others being Lal Mirch, I-Pin and a few others that I can't be bothered remember at the moment.**

**I haven't decided if we will be seeing more of Chrome as of yet, but it quite possible that she will randomly pop in future chapters. **


End file.
